What weight of ancient witness can prevail / If private judgement hold the public scale? -Dryden

April 17, 2013

This was a heinous and cowardly act. And given what we now know about
what took place, the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism. Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror. What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack,
or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist
organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent
individual.

- President Obama on the Boston Marathon Bombings, April 16, 2013

/

.

.

THE DAILY BEAST : There was a big hullabaloo duirng the 2008 presidential election over your relationship to Obama. What is or was your relationship to him?

BILL AYERS : I brief him every Monday in the White House, and he never listens! No. The truth is exactly what he said
and what the campaign said in 2008. David Axelrod said we were
friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that
was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true;
Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was
true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was
“a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true.

"Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror."

- President Barack Obama, April 16, 2013

.

This—violence, death, and white-hot rhetoric—is his past and Ayers
insists he has no regrets. "I acted appropriately in the context of
those times," he says. But it's hard to reconcile this quick-witted man
with that revolutionary. Today Bill Ayers seems too happy to have ever
been so angry.

Guess
who`s opening speaker for the Women in Charge conference sponsored by
the Junior League and United Way? Why, none other than Bernardine Dohrn.
The conference brochure describes her as ``a child advocate, a law
graduate, a mother of three boys, an anti-war and civil rights activist,
a Little League coach . . . `` That leaves out a few minor biographical
details such as her role in the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969, her
years on the FBI`s Most Wanted list and her conviction in connection
with the infamous Brink`s robbery in New York. But that was then. Now,
the most frightening thing about Dohrn, THE 1960s radical, is that she
is not only a Little League coach, but she`s 48 years old.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Sept. 27, 1990:Corrections and clarifications.The
INC. column Sept. 23 erroneously said Bernardine Dohrn had been
convicted ``in connection with the infamous Brink`s robbery in NewYork.`` In fact, she served seven months for civil contempt for not cooperating with a grand jury investigating the robbery.

At the time, she was unapologetic, and, to this day, she has made only
guarded public expressions of remorse. Indeed, she told me she senses
continuity between her past and her present work. Her brother-in-law
John Ayers, adds,"I don't think she's ashamed in any way. She continues
to have a radical view of American society." [...]

Stronger language comes from Peter Collier, a radical turned conservative whose 1989 book, Destructive Generation
(co-written with David Horowitz), is bitterly critical of late-sixties
political movements. "The part that I think is outrageous has very
little to do with her," he says. "It's Northwestern and it's MacArthur
and it's the bar. What it shows me is this moron Dan Quayle, he really
hit a nerve here on this notion of the cultural elite, the idea that
these people would protect and enhance the reputation of this vicious,
bloody-minded woman who is kind of the Lady Macbeth of the movement.
This is an amazing thing and it could happen only on the Left."

In Destructive Generation, Collier recounts a chance meeting at
around that time between Dohrn and Mark Rudd, another radical leader
who'd also been underground for a time. "She asked him what he thought
about the whole experience," Collier writes. "He told her that he
thought of it as seven years of wasted life; that neither he nor they
had accomplished anything, and he wished he'd gotten out at the
beginning. 'She got furious [Rudd recounts] and said: "But what about
the contribution we made to the overall struggle for armed struggle and
revolution in America?" I couldn't believe the rhetoric. The same old
shit. I just said to myself, "Oh, later for you, lady," and took off.
Later on it occurred to me how her ego was still totally involved with
all that dead history. How little she had looked at herself all those
years. She should have had to admit how wrong her ideas were, how
meshuga her self-conception was. A great revolutionary leader' She had
no great revolutionary ideas. None of us did. She was just the daughter
of a credit manager of a Milwaukee furniture store.'''

THE DAILY BEAST: All things considered, would you do it again the same way with the Weather Underground?

BILL AYERS: I feel like I’ve lived a very blessed life. Having three amazing kids
and three amazing grandchildren, being a teacher for 40 years, it is
all terrific stuff. And opposing the war in Vietnam with every fiber of
my being? I couldn’t be happier or prouder of that. In terms of
opposition to the war, I have no regrets. People want me to say I really
regret being in extreme opposition of the war, and I don’t regret that.

April 11, 2013

A&E's "Bates Motel" is kind of a mess, but that's one of the reasons it's fun to watch. The drama is, of course, based on Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," and the novel by Robert Bloch. Technically, it's a prequel, focusing on Norman Bates before he went off the deep end, and on his mother before she became beef jerky on a rope.

.

Adam Lanza, 20, fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary Schoolin the village of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut. Before driving to the school, Lanza had shot and killed his mother Nancy at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

.

Norman Bates

Adam Lanza

Norman's mother.

Adam's mother.

Norman's home.

Adam's home.

Unfortunately for Hollywood, the similarities extend beyond the physical:

"Norman discovers a strange notebook filled with drawings of Asian women in bondage..."

"Just two weeks before the Newtown shooting, Nancy discovered ghastly and
sinister pictures in her son’s room featuring dead bodies..."

We get that he's an
outsider and that he has no social skills. But as a character, he
becomes ironically more three-dimensional only when he's home with
his mother. Well, you know what they say: A boy's best friend is his mother. In the case of "Bates Motel," make that "fiend."

What emerges in this exploration of a still unfolding story is a
portrait of a mother, apparently devoted but perhaps misguided,
struggling to find her son a place in society, and a boy, exceptionally
smart in some areas, profoundly deficient in others, who never found a
place in the world. Although he had played musical instruments,
studied foreign languages and had a part-time job at a computer shop,
Adam remained isolated and distant.

Any chance Bates Motel will go the way of the assualt rifle?

A&E has picked up the "Pyscho" prequel series, which stars
Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga as Norman and Norma Bates
respectively, for a second season.

The renewal of "Bates Motel"
comes as no surprise: The premiere brought in 3.0 million viewers
total, making it the most-watched original drama debut in the key
demographics in A&E's history.

“Bates Motel’ has garnered critical acclaim and a loyal audience in its
first few weeks,” said A&E President Bob DeBitetto in a statement.
“With superb writing and exceptional acting, led by the critically
acclaimed performances of Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore, we’re
incredibly excited to see where [executive producers] Carlton [Cuse] and
Kerry [Ehrin] take Norma and Norman Bates next.”

April 08, 2013

The story as I was told it is that in the
early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting
with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed.
When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join
her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves
around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and
asked if they'd like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, "I will
have beef."

Yes, said the waiter. "And the vegetables?"

"They will have beef too."

- Peggy Noonan

Related :

"Some Socialists seem to believe people should
be a numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals.
We're all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is quite like anyone else,
however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. And we believe
everyone has the right to be unequal, but to us, every human being is
equally important."

I very much enjoyed reading my classmate Sonia Sotomayor’s account of her Princeton experience in her book, My Beloved World,
and found much that I could relate to as another daughter of
immigrants from modest circumstances. I did, however, have to chuckle
at her immodest claim of having been the first to discover how to use a
computer to word-process her senior thesis. By the spring of 1976 a
goodly number of seniors, myself included, were making use of the
computers at the EQuad to produce our theses. It required no computer
knowledge, which I certainly did not have; in fact, the only skills
needed were the ability to type on the keyboard of a computer monitor
and to handle a box of punch cards.

Part of my financial aid package committed me to weekly hours in
the work study program. At the start of freshman year, I was assigned to
food service at the commons, but a lingering case of mononucleosis took
me off the cafeteria line. I needed a desk job where I couldn't cause
an epidemic. I was eager too, to explore something new. The food service
job was standard student fare in a predictable environment. But when I
saw a posting for a keypunch operator at the Computer Center I was
intrigued.

Computers were a brave new world when I started work
there in 1972 and access to their powers was confined to cavernous
campus centers. Judith Rowe, head of the center's social sciences
division, was a pioneer; among the first to envision the potential of
quantitative analysis in the social sciences, she saw that computers
would be the key to realizing it. To advance that vision she encouraged
graduate students to use computers to analyze their research data, an
effort she facilitated by hiring work-study students like me to do the
data entry. One project I worked on was with the historian Vernon
Burton, who had discovered a treasure trove of old census records near
his hometown in South Carolina. (There is such serendipity in historical
research: Vernon had stopped on a back road to buy a soda when he
spotted the stack of ledgers holding up a shelf; he offered to build
some proper shelves for the shopkeeper in return for the ledgers.) My
job was to key all the census data onto punch cards and help Vernon run
the analysis.

I had taken a typing course in high school,
figuring I could always get a job that way, if necessary. That was
qualification enough to start, as no one beyond the programmers
themselves, had any computer skills. Under Judith's guidance I learned a
bit about programming and became skilled at keypunching. Because the
work was specialized, I earned double what I had been making in the
cafeteria. There were other perks too, we could set our own hours and
come in a we were; in jeans and T-shirts. It was a student's dream job,
and I kept it all 4 years at Princeton, working there 10 or 15 hours a
week on top of the other jobs that came and went.

The mainframe of the computer gave off so much heat, its room was
cooled to frigid temperatures, and I wore a jacket and gloves whenever I
went down to into the basement to feed my stack of punch cards into the
machine. If the program crashed, I had to inspect each card
individually to find the error. Often that meant perusing hundreds or
even thousands of punchcards for a single mistaken keystroke, a
maddening effort. Next to the monitor that showed the jobs queuing to
run on the computer was a metal post that seemed to serve no purpose. It
was a while before someone explained it to me; after repeatedly
replastering the wall, the administration had decided to install the
post for the convenience of frustrated students, who invariably needed
something to kick when their code crashed.

Later, in my senior
year, I was taking a break from writing my thesis to catch up on a
couple of hours of keypunch work when an idea occurred to me: Why not
enter the text of my thesis on the same type of punch cards that we were
using for data analysis? That way, I could make changes as needed to
individual cards without having to retype all the subsequent pages.
Judith was intrigued. She thought it a worthwhile experiment, and she
assigned another operator to do the data entry for me. It's hard to be
certain, but I might have submitted the first word-processed senior
thesis in Princeton's history, and I didn't even have to type it myself.

Related reading :

"There’s something weird about the need to tell quite so many unnecessary fictions."

I Won!

It Goes Without Saying

All original material published here is the property of the writer who penned it. Stealing is not only frowned upon but will be dealt with by strong-armed men trained in the art of legal jujitsu. The views put forth here are not the views of any employer we know which is most unfortunate.